Curriculum Vitae - Oliver Godby

Software Engineering is, and has been for the last sixteen years, a truly rewarding way for me to contribute to a wide variety of businesses and organisations in a very positive manner. At the heart of my understanding of what I do, is the idea that by bringing my skills to bear I can solve problems and create opportunities for the people I work with to achieve the goals laid out for the organisation that we are helping to build together.

The greatest feeling in my working life is shipping code that my team and I can be proud of, not only in the moment but moving forward into the journey of evolving and maintaining our applications in the most efficient and agile way, empowering us to continue to bring value and make a tangible, positive impact on the success of our shared enterprise.

Beyond that, I love the process of collaborating with commercial and creative people to carry an idea from specification, into launch and then ongoing development by leveraging the exciting and powerful technologies, both proven and emerging, that are now at our disposal in this dynamic skill space.

Employment history - Summary

As Head of Engineering and Technology at Zipmatch, I am responsible for day to day technical delivery across the company and ongoing planning and development of our platform to deliver market-leading Real Estate services to both Real Estate Professionals and Homebuyers.

CompareAsia is charting a bold course to offering the best price comparison services in Personal Finance, Insurance and Communications across South East Asia.

As CTO I am responsible for our ongoing Engineering effort and for implementing Best Practice across the group to ensure stability and quality for all our web properties in the region. Implementing a culture of Quality Driven Engineering Excellence, Agile Engineering Practices and putting us on the road to DevOps as a business process are all part and parcel of driving our Technical process forwards towards greater productivity and innovation.

November 2013 to January 2015: Technical & Development Lead - BBC World Service Responsive

As the lead engineer on the World Service Responsive website property, I led the technical direction for twenty-seven International sites and 2 UK non-English Language sites as the group went through the process of platform migration due to a contract end of life and a desire within the organisation to move our applications towards a continuous delivery model. My role included technical design and planning, not only at the application level, but at the system stack level, particularly with reference to new cloud-based components. I was also responsible for mentoring and guiding the other engineers and for ensuring that we worked to the engineering excellence best practices at the heart of the BBC engineering ethos, including both TDD and BDD, pair programming, code review and rotating responsibilities for release management. The current picture in BBC News Engineering (which is the parent group for World Service and a handful of other teams) is one of bold innovation, innovation in terms of technology, working practices and overall vision. It was a joy and a privilege to be a key part of the senior team that was plotting our course during my tenure there, while at the same time helping to execute on those plans through contributing code and experience back into my team.

September 2012 to October 2013: European Engineering Lead for Vivastreet - vivastreet.com

Running the London development team, and driving change in terms of process and architecture, I have been working at all points of the SDLC both on maintenance and new projects in support of the business needs for the web application and associated systems.
I also led the charge to adopt new, more powerful and better suited technical approaches, and to strengthen the uptake of TDD across the business, driving quality up from the coalface of the code, rather than leaving the assurance of quality to a mixture of fate and an over-worked test team.

July 2010 to September 2012: Owner / Lead Consultant for ScholaNoctis Ltd.

This is my Ltd. Company through which I worked as a freelance software engineering consultant. It is still trading.

Specific Projects:

• PHP Development work for BBC Forge Platform (PAL) as a part of the Radio and Music Team in PoD. (OO PHP5 / Zend Framework, PHPUnit, Cucumber, Jasmine, qUnit, Web Services (RESTful) integration, Javascript / JQuery)) - During this job I have done holiday cover for the tech lead and I have led a couple of side projects.
• PHP Development work for BBC Forge Platform (PAL) as a part of the iVote Project. (OO PHP5 / Zend Framework, PHPUnit, Web Services (RESTful) integration, Javascript / JQuery)
• Codebase Evaluation and Audit work for LBSIC Ltd. (Inspection of and report on an existing PHP codebase)
• Expression Engine to Salesforce Integration project for Ambition Creative (OO PHP5, SOAP, Salesforce API)

March 2009 to July 2010: Web Architecture and Development Lead for RiverMuse Ltd.

Blazing a trail onwards and upwards into the 21st Century providing the new generation of Network Management software to the community and Enterprise alike... My work at RiverMuse ranged from UI development and maintenance (Javascript / JQuery / extJS), Middleware development (PHP / MySQL / Zend Framework / Doctrine) and custom web-application development (Django / Python).

In order to cover a resource gap when a release was needed on a deadline I went in to Favorit to do some coding work on their property 'Tweetmeme.com' (linked above). The project was delivered on time and on spec in a realtively short space of time, and there was a great sense of achievement in bringing something new and exciting to the website in such a short period of time.

As a part of the Application Engineering Team (EMEA), I worked on customisations to the standard RightNow CRM Solution as requested and / or
dictated by client requirement. This includes tasks from data modelling and adaptation, to bulk import and export of data, Web Service Integrations,
User Interface customisations and logical extensions to existing capabilities to provide business integration with other solutions leveraged by
RightNow's clients. This work required a strong understanding of and ability to use PHP and Javascript.

Working with a specially assembled team on a short-term project, it was my role to implement multiple territory websites based on
the ZEND Framework, using an OOP and MVC based approach. The role included an amount of front-end, UI work with Javascript and AJAX as well as
extensive Object Design and code review and refactoring in order to create the most efficient solution possible, both in terms of performance and
ease of multiple application launch and maintenance.

Working in PHP 5 and using Web Services to communicate with external data sources,
both using REST and SOAP, my role was to prepare Crowdstorm's public-facing and internal
web applications for launch / funding rounds. My role also included managing one permanent
offshore developer and co-ordinating with a variety of external, project-work suppliers.

Working in PHP 4, PHP 5 and to a lesser extent C# and Perl, my role was
to maintain existing internal and external web applications, and extend their
functionality as and when needed during SpinVox's main growth phase from start-up
company to mature business.

August 2004 -
May 2005: Web Developer for Sthree Management Services.

In the time I spent there as a permanent member of staff I
was instrumental in designing and building their new Web Application Framework and
implementing it using defensive programming techniques and aspects of the eXtreme
Programming methodology. All of our development work was driven by Unit Testing and
front end testing of page renders using a combination of phpUnit and a bespoke system
for testing web-page renders. My role also included the ongoing maintenance.

Over the two years that I was a part of the company we not only developed Enterprise Level resource management tools for distributing web-based working, but we also prototyped a variety of technologies, specifically web-based control of monitoring equipment for controlled environments and online distribution and audit of digitally signed documentation for the pharmaceutical industry.